Game Design Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

2025

This exhibition featured the work of current professors in the University of Tennessee School of Art. Exhibiting faculty were: Joshua Bienko, Emily Bivens, Sally Brogden, Jason S. Brown, Paul Harrill, Paul Lee, Sarah Lowe, Beauvais Lyons, Frank Martin, Althea Murphy-Price, John Powers, Deborah Shmerler, Jered Sprecher, Cary Staples, Claire Stigliani, David Wilson, Karla Wozniak, Koichi Yamamoto, and Sam Yates

2025, Journal of awareness

Bu çalışmada, matematik ve sanat ilişkisi çeşitli yönleri ile ele alınmış ve bu ikili arasında var olan ilişkinin varlığı ortaya çıkarılmaya çalışılmıştır. Sanatın birçok alanında meydana çıkarılmış dünyaca ünlü eserlerin matematik ile birlikte düşünüldüğünde ortaya koydukları olağanüstü güzellik ve ihtişam bu çalışma ile az da olsa gözler önüne serilmeye çalışılmıştır.

2025

Creativity in game design is not as widely studied as it is in general design discipline. While it may be argued that game design is simply a special case of design, in reality, it is peculiar in many ways and hence needs special attention. We aim to understand the game ideation process through the lens of creativity model. We first develop a theoretical creativity model based on the concepts in the creativity literature. We then study the ideation process of game design students and understand how it fits with the proposed theoretical model. We find that the game ideation discovered through field study broadly follows the theoretical model. Our larger research goal to develop a refined ideation model and build an ideation tool for game designers. This paper discusses the first step towards it.

2025

Cohesion between content and gameplay can lead to games that are educational and enjoyable at the same time, making them effective. Endogenous designs, wherein the game elements emerge from the content, lead to such cohesion. However, endogenous design is not commonly observed in practice. Lack of guidance on conceptualizing endogenous design is an important factor hampering production of effective educational games. In this paper, we present ‘Endogen’ framework for designing endogenous educational games. The framework synthesized using the ‘function-behavior-structure’ approach is composed of a set of design strategies that we discovered in our recent work. It is validated using a multi-method approach wherein designers use the framework to design games and then rate it on various parameters. Results indicate that Endogen achieves the stated objective of creating endogenous design, therefore offering exciting content integration possibilities for game designers.

2025

Educational game designers strive to fulfill the promise of making learning fun. Games with endogenous design can fulfill this promise. In endogenous design, the gameplay emerges from the content, thus seamlessly integrating the act of playing with learning. However, a review of literature informs us of the lack of guidance on the endogenous design of educational games. There is a need to develop a framework which can aid designers achieve endogenous design. In this paper, we propose strategies for the endogenous design of educational games. We conduct in-situ studies using think-aloud protocol analysis to extract the tacit knowledge that designers discreetly use in practice. We synthesize the extracted knowledge into concise design strategies. The identification of these design strategies is a significant step towards building a framework for endogenous design of educational games.

2025, International Journal of Serious Games

Concerns about climate change associated with the combustion of fossil fuels urge a call for widespread reductions in household energy use. Determining means of achieving this is a key challenge faced by environmental scientists. The current research presents insights gained from a 12-month empirical trial of new serious game for energy, ‘EnergyCat’; which was designed to encourage household energy reductions in the UK social housing sector. Effects of gameplay on consumption behaviours and energy awareness were explored using 82 UK social housing households (versus a no-game control). Results indicated the intervention did not lead to any substantive changes in awareness or consumption practices. However, post-intervention feedback highlighted several issues in terms of game design and usability that may explain why the game failed to change behaviour in this instance. We provide a framework of suggestions as to how the game design process could be improved in order to engage resid...

2025, 2010 Brazilian Symposium on Games and Digital Entertainment

There are not many initiatives in the area of game development for children with special needs, specially children with Down syndrome. The major purpose of our research is to promote cognitive development of disabled children in the context of inclusive education. In order to do so, we address aspects of interaction, communication and game design in stimulating selected cognitive abilities. By using a Human-Computer Interaction method based on the Inspection of Evaluation, it was possible to study and understand user interaction with the interface and thus examine the positive aspects as well as the communicability problems found with the JECRIPE game -a game developed specially for children with Down syndrome in pre-scholar age.

2025, BMC Medical Education

Background Cultural safety training, whereby health professionals learn to reflect on their own culture and to respect the cultural identity of patients, could address intercultural tensions in health care. Given the context of their medical education, however, medical students might perceive such training to be dull or even unnecessary. Game jams, collaborative workshops to create and play games, are a potentially engaging learning environment for medical students today. How medical students learn while making games is poorly documented. This study describes the characteristics of educational games created by participants in a cultural safety game jam and the concepts they used to create games. Methods As part of a trial, 268 Colombian medical students divided into 48 groups participated in an eight-hour game jam to create a prototype of an educational game on cultural safety. In this qualitative descriptive study, we reviewed the description of the games uploaded by participants, ...

2025

Game design is a fundamental and critical part of the videogame development process, demanding a high cost in terms of time and effort from the team of designers. The availability of tools for assisting in this task is therefore of the foremost interest. These can not just speed up the process and reduce costs, but also improve the overall quality of the results by providing useful suggestions and hints. A conceptual system to approach the construction of this kind of tools is presented in this work. By using a learning component, the preferences and expertise of the designers can be modelled and to some extent simulated. This model is subsequently exploited by an optimization component that tries to create adequate game designs. A proof of concept of the system is provided in the context of level design in Metroidvania games. It is shown that the system can produce quality solutions and hints to the designer.

2025

This paper is a preliminary attemps to serve as a reference of the state of the art of the techniques and tools related to 'Game Design' (GD). We analyze the relationship existing between Game Design and the main subareas related to Artificial and Computational Intelligence in Games. Here, we focus particularly in Techniques and Tools that help in any way to designers involved in game development.

2025

This paper will look at Dadaist tendencies in game art projects such as Wafaa Bilal's Virtual Jihadi and the author's collaborative project Grand Theft Bicycle. The focus will be on how certain game art projects borrow from popular games such as Grand Theft Auto and Quake, and invert/subvert the meaning of the originals by 'modding' aspects of the original world (i.e. the characters, the sounds, the basic concept), while leaving much of the source (i.e. the background textures, the AI) intact. This paper argues that the game art mod is a digital descendent of the Dadaist ready-made. More specifically the paper will look at the particular Dadaist-inspired absurdities in Grand Theft Bicycle (GTB), such as the use of an aerobic-style bicycle to engage in a political battle with world leaders within a vacuous game environment. GTB is part of a sub-genre I am describing as 'Dadaist game art.' In short, Dadaist game art uses the forms of commercial gaming, but inverts normally uncritical game content to include ironic reflections on the culture of gaming. Dadaist game art borrows from game culture, but provides a new take on gaming that is contradictory, provocative and absurd in the Dadaist sense. Fig. 1.

2025, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications

2025

In this paper, we discuss some of the results of a participatory design workshop used to elicit design guidelines for an education game for phonemic awareness intended for use by disadvantaged students. Using a grounded theory approach, we analyze facilitators’ observations from the workshop and related findings to well-established game design guidelines. We were able to align facilitators’ observations with these guidelines in order to prescribe ways to support student participation, mitigate student disengagement, support various team roles and dynamics, and accommodate a variety of game play strategies.

2025, CILME

REFERENCIA: Alvarado, A., Amorós-Poveda, L. y Fernández, L. C. (2025). EduExploradores. Gamificando el Marco de Competencia Digital Docente. En VI Congreso Internacional Liderazgo y Mejora de la Educación: Políticas, gobernanza e... more

REFERENCIA:
Alvarado, A., Amorós-Poveda, L. y Fernández, L. C. (2025). EduExploradores. Gamificando el Marco de Competencia Digital Docente. En VI Congreso Internacional Liderazgo y Mejora de la Educación: Políticas, gobernanza e inclusión, Actas. Mayo, 26-28. Murcia, España. http://hdl.handle.net/10201/156640

2025, International Journal of Contemporary Management

Purpose. This paper focuses on social (informal, interpersonal) relationships and identifies their positive effects on business activity in -a rarely empirically analyzed -the video game industry. Methodology. Given the lack of previous research on the positive business effects of social relationships in the chosen empirical context, qualitative and explorative research was conducted. To address the research goals, seventeen semi-structured in-depth interviews and one focus group interview with six video game developers were carried out. The interviews were analyzed using inductive coding procedure. (2) among the key actors maintaining such relationships are: consumers (i.e., gamers), business partners (investors, contractors, and co-operators), employees (past and current), and competitors; (3) industry-specific social relationships benefits are identified by comparing them with the general social relationships benefits indicated in the literature, detailing them in the chosen empirical context, and addressing the type of actors with which social links are exploited. Practical implications. Game developers can realize with whom to maintain social relations within video game industry to generate particular business benefits, for example, better promotion and higher game sales, building a proper firm's image. Originality: The identification of actors of social relationships diverse in terms of establishing and intentional usage of social relationships, the recognition of the specific business-related benefits of maintaining social relationships by video game developers, and providing empirical evidence of the industry-wide determinants of the benefits of maintaining social relationships. Keywords social/informal relationships, creative industries, gaming communities, VGI, video game developers, qualitative research.

2025

An executive summary of the Cascadian Synergetics project generated from online sources by Perplexity.ai

2025, Lecture Notes in Computer Science

A supply chain is a network of companies producing and distributing products to end-consumers. The Québec Wood Supply Game (QWSG) is a board game designed to teach supply chain dynamics. The QWSG provides the agent model for every company in our simulation. The goal of this paper is to introduce this simulation model. For this purpose, we first outline the QWSG, and then describe with mathematical equations each company in our simulation. Finally, three examples illustrate the use of our simulation to study collaboration in supply chains. More precisely, we study incentives for collaboration at both the supply chain and company level.

2025, International Journal of Mobile Human Computer Interaction

Mobile technology has created new possibilities for location-based playful learning experiences. This article describes the MuseumScrabble mobile game, aimed at children visiting a historical museum. The game requires that the players explore the museum and link abstract concepts with physical artefacts using a mobile device. The focus of this article is on the interaction design process and the subsequent observations made during field evaluation of the game. Design principles that guide the development of such a game are presented and concern playfulness, learning, social interaction, physical aspects of the game and flow between physical and digital space. This article explores how these design principles are reflected in the study and how problem-solving strategies and collaboration and competition patterns are developed by children in this multi-player educational game.

2025, Springer eBooks

A great many people play online games and sales of online games are considerable, but research has further shown that a major reason behind the failure of games in the market is poor user interface design or usability, highlighting even more the importance of these issues in games design. This research uses surveys and focus groups to explore the factors influencing the usability and interface design of online games. First the definition and different types of game are discussed, and then the composition and features of online game interfaces analyzed. Second, a review is made of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research literature relating to design criteria for game interfaces. Finally, in discussion with experts, this study isolates the design criteria that should be emphasized when designing each key element of an online game interface.

2025, Human-Computer Interaction. Interacting in Various Application Domains

2025, JMIR Serious Games

Background: Smoking is recognized as the largest, single, preventable cause of death and disease in the developed world. While the majority of smokers report wanting to quit, and many try each year, smokers find it difficult to maintain long-term abstinence. Behavioral support, such as education, advice, goal-setting, and encouragement, is known to be beneficial in improving the likelihood of succeeding in a quit attempt, but it remains difficult to effectively deliver this behavioral support and keep the patient engaged with the process for a sufficient duration. In an attempt to solve this, there have been numerous mobile apps developed, yet engagement and retention have remained key challenges that limit the potential effectiveness of these interventions. Video games have been clearly linked with the effective delivery of health interventions, due to their capacity to increase motivation and engagement of players. The objective of this study is to describe the design and development of a smartphone app that is theory-driven, and which incorporates gaming characteristics in order to promote engagement with content, and thereby help smokers to quit. Methods: Game design and development was informed by a taxonomy of motivational affordances for meaningful gamified and persuasive technologies. This taxonomy describes a set of design components that is grounded in well-established psychological theories on motivation. Results: This paper reports on the design and development process of Quittr, a mobile app, describing how game design principles, game mechanics, and game elements can be used to embed education and support content, such that the app actually requires the user to access and engage with relevant educational content. The next stage of this research is to conduct a randomized controlled trial to determine whether the additional incentivization game features offer any value in terms of the key metrics of engagement-how much content users are consuming, how many days users are persisting with using the app, and what proportion of users successfully abstain from smoking for 28 days, based on user-reported data and verified against a biochemical baseline using cotinine tests. We describe a novel, and theoretically-informed mobile app design approach that has a broad range of potential applications. By using the virtual currency approach, we remove the need for the game to comprehensively integrate the healthy activity as part of its actual play mechanics. This opens up the potential for a wide variety of health problems to be tackled through games where no obvious play mechanic presents itself. The implications of this app are that similar approaches may be of benefit in areas such as managing chronic conditions (diabetes, heart disease, etc), treating substance abuse (alcohol, illicit drugs, etc), diet and exercise, eating disorders (anorexia, bulimia, and binge eating), and various phobias.

2025, AZTI arrantza

The idea of writing is taken for granted as one side of the literacy coin in English and literacy curricula, classrooms and research, of which the obverse, inseparable, complementary, somehow made of the same metal, is reading. In the world of media education, things are not so simple. For historical reasons, 'media literacy' has been heavily weighted towards 'reading', variously constructed as practices of consumption, interpretation, analysis, critique and (more rarely) appreciation. The first influential motive for 'reading' the media in these senses in classrooms came from Leavis and Thompson's proposal to English teachers that they should arm children against the depredations of the mass media with the weapons of critical analysis (1933). The development of media education since those days of 'inoculation' against ill effects has seen the growth of a consensus, albeit unevenly distributed across the Anglophone world (and differently again across Europe), around a more positive model, which recognises, especially in the wake of the Cultural Studies tradition, the value of popular media, and the need to explore them both critically and appreciatively . Along with this has come the development of a critical apparatus of conceptual tools on which learners can hang understandings of media institutions, texts and audiences.

2025, Lecture Notes in Computer Science

This paper presents a generative system for the automatic creation of video game levels. Our approach is novel in that it allows high-level design goals to be expressed in a top-down manner, while existing bottom-up techniques do not. We use the FI-2Pop genetic algorithm as a natural way to express both constraints and optimization goals for potential level designs. We develop a genetic encoding technique specific to level design, which proves to be extremely flexible. Example levels are generated for two different genres of game, demonstrating the system's broad applicability.

2025, Proceedings of the First International Conference on Computational Creativity (ICCCX). Lisbon, Portugal: ACM

Abstract. A generative system that creates levels for 2D platformer games is presented. The creation process is driven by generic models of challenge-based fun which are derived from existing theories of game design. These models are used as fitness functions in a genetic algorithm to produce new levels that maximize the amount of player fun, and the results are compared with existing levels from the classic video game Super Mario Bros. This technique is novel among systems for creating video game content as it does not follow a complex ...

2025, Proceedings of the ... Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences

Teaching software architecture is a challenge because of the difficulty to expose students to actual meaningful design situations. Games can provide a useful illustration of the design decision making process, and teach students the power of team interaction for making sound decisions. We introduce a game -DecidArch-developed to achieve three learning objectives: ) create awareness about the rationale involved in design decision making, ) enable appreciation of the reasoning behind candidate design decisions proposed by others, and ) create awareness about interdependencies between design decisions. The game has been played by groups with a total of players, all of them students of the VU software architecture course. We present some of the lessons learned, both from our observation and through participant survey. We conclude that the game well supports our three learning objectives, and we identify several improvement points for future game editions.

2025

We report on the use of our DecidArch game to teach software architecture design decision making in two consecutive years. We compare the support of three learning goals for the first version of the game with the second, revised version.... more

2025

Digital games seem to have enormous educational potential. But something goes wrong. Although the field of digital games is booming, games that are designed with an educational purpose in mind have a large variety of deficiencies. The treatment of knowledge in games is a decisive factor. There is an obvious difficulty of balancing the virtual vs. the real-a phenomenon in games that is not yet well-understood. The paper demonstrates how knowledge in games may be properly used as knowledge-a step towards learning effects.

2025

The gamification intervention is a pedagogical approach of learning activities that introduces game mechanics in a non-game context to drive the learning outcomes. In the era of technology and recent advances, the education system has evolved significantly, by adopting many software, tools, and gamification elements to learning. This concept paper will discuss how board games could be developed based on the typical gamification mechanics, specifically adopting the concepts of Monopoly. The application of board games with Augmented Reality (AR) elements in learning among undergraduate students is a new approach that can be taken in the classroom. By implementing AR into any gamification-based intervention, it gives the player better immersion and a different experience than they are used to. This study proposed that any subject in Higher Education will be better understood through the elements of gamification using board games. Additionally, the utilization of gamification in the edu...

2025

El proyecto OlimpiadaFDI ha consistido en el desarrollo de una plataforma gamificada de juegos educativos,centrada en el ambito de la Ingenieria Informatica. La vision del proyecto es la creacion de una plataforma inspirada en Steam o Xbox Live en la que distintos desarrolladores pueden contribuir distintos juegos, pero las puntuaciones, insignias y logros conseguidos dentro de cada juego se asocian al perfil de cada usuario. Ademas, la plataforma esta concebida para soportar juegos de distintas plataformas (e.g. HTML5, Android, C++, Java) que podrian ser implementadas por distintos equipos de desarrollo. De cara a conseguir estos objetivos, el desarrollado ha consistido en la realizacion de la infraestructura de una plataforma de distribucion de juegos educativos y servicios, tanto para los juegos como para los usuarios. Esta plataforma se basa en una pagina web que nos permite realizar la gestion de los usuarios, ademas de gestionar las puntuaciones y logros de cada usuario, la cr...

2025, Digital Games Research Association Conference

2025, International Conference of Learning Sciences

The main purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of handheld gaming on student learning in mathematics. During the four-month instructional period, 50 2 nd grade students from three classes used a handheld Skills Arena software program or paper-based flash cards under various conditions depending on their teacher's preference. Overall results proved that the handheld game activity in the classroom was beneficial to students in learning mathematics, especially for low-ability students, regardless of gender and ethnic background. In a non-experimental, correlational analysis, the results reveal that handheld game scores and attitude toward mathematics correlated significantly to students' scores on a mathematic test. In the results of a quasi-experimental control-group design with Repeated Measures, handheld gaming students outperformed students who did not use a handheld game on a mathematic test. Additionally, handheld low-level students outperformed those who did not use a handheld game on the same test.

2025

Marketing educators often use case studies as it is a form of experiential learning. However, successful case-study teaching requires students to be prepared. Yet, research shows that students are becoming more and more reluctant to reading assigned class material and their motivation is lower when teaching is done with traditional media. Students have become the virtual generation who plays games every day and games can keep them motivated several hours at a time. But the development of teaching games is costly and instructors are reluctant to use games that have been developed by others as they rarely completely match their expectations and teaching styles. This paper describes two experiments showing that any marketing professor can gamify a case study into a sandbox virtual world.

2025, 11th International Conference eLearning and Software for Education

This paper tackles the issue of Serious Games design by drawing on the experience conducted in the framework of the i-Treasures project, which deals with the preservation and transmission of Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH). In i-Treasures a collection of Serious Games has been developed addressing four relevant ICH areas: singing, dancing, craftsmanship and music composition. So far one game for each of the four areas has been developed; the ultimate aim of the games is making learning and transmission of specific ICH expressions (namely Tsamiko dance, human beat box, pottery, contemporary music composition) more motivating, engaging and, ultimately, effective. Starting from the concept of pedagogy-driven game design, the main pedagogical choices adopted are outlined. Further considerations on the overall design process are also proposed by focusing, in particular, on the need for engaging in a collaborative work a variety of professionals (in the case partners of the project) wi...

2025, Lecture Notes in Computer Science

One of the areas of Game-Based Learning (GBL) that has been attracting considerable interest in recent years is digital game making, whereby learners play games but also design, construct and share them as active participants in a learning community. Human Computer Interaction (HCI) is a critical aspect of processes and tools within game making, and plays a key role in ensuring that learning experiences are both engaging and educationally fruitful. In this light, this paper examines two different game authoring environments from an HCI perspective, taking account of certain interface characteristics can affect and shape the authoring process and thus have a potential bearing on educational effectiveness. The investigation draws on findings from an EU co-funded project called MAGICAL (MAking Games In CollaborAtion for Learning), which is exploring the potential that game making offers for activating key transversal skills such as problem-solving, creativity and ICT competency, particularly at primary school level.

2025

Considerando isso, muitas universidades optaram em desenvolver e apoiar projetos com enfase na robotica educacional. No municipio de Joinville, na Universidade do Estado de Santa Catarina - UDESC, o Grupo Estudantil de Robotica Movel (GERM), apresenta como uma de suas motivacoes o incentivo da busca pelo aprendizado de ciencia e tecnologia por meio da robotica movel.

2025, Canadian Game Studies Association Annual Conference

In Elden Ring, the Shabriri Grape serves as a focal point for the metaphysical speculation that has become distinctive of the studio's oeuvre under the tenure of game director and now company president Hidetaka Miyazaki. As the player-character blindly pulls on the threads of Queen Marika's Golden Order, woven as they are throughout the Lands Between, they find themselves inducted into a metaphysical investigation. Elden Ring toys with questions of ontology and subjectivity that challenge the idealist branch of the Western philosophical canon, and in so doing introduces a ludic torsion that requires its players to come to terms with notions of the real and its organization that go back to the beginning of recorded critical inquiry. Elden Ring, redoubling the stylistics of its forebears, is distinctly hermetic in its narrative construction, and consequently it requires of its players a hermeneutic sensibility, a willingness to engage in the interpretation of the textual traces scattered throughout its gameworld, traces such as those which accompany the Shabriri Grape. To follow the guidance of this "yellowing, oozing eyeball," to set off in pursuit of the "distant light" it reveals, the player-character must go to the limits of their knowledge, indeed to the very limit of knowledge as such, to the original scission or abyss from which the world of Elden Ring was born.

2025, Revista EducaOnline

com o objetivo de desenvolver tecnologias e metodologias para promover a aprendizagem, a partir do acervo de museus.

2025

Gênova é sem sombra de dúvida a terra de grandes navegadores. De lá não saíram apenas Cristóvão Colombo e Américo Vespucci, como inclusive seus predecessores, os irmãos Ugolino e Vadino Vivaldi cujas histórias povoam o imaginário italiano. A viagem não é um deslocamento no espaço mas também no tempo e, por isso, é assim, como a poesia, uma forma de experiência. Desse modo, encontro nos versos de "Navegar é preciso", que Fernando Pessoa publicou em Mensagem, não a semântica desgastada que faz do antigo lema da Escola de Sagres uma espécie de clichê, mas a oportunidade para pensá-los enquanto um fazer, o próprio fazer da poesia: Genova è senza dubbio una terra di grandi navigatori. Da lì è venuto non solo Cristoforo Colombo e Amerigo Vespucci, anche come i loro predecessori, i fratelli Ugolino e Vadino Vivaldi, cui storie popolare habitano la fantasia italiana. Il viaggio non è uno spostamento nello spazio ma anche nel tempo e, quindi, è così, come in poesia, la forma di esperienza. In tal modo trovo nei versi del poema "Navigare è necessario," di Fernando Pessoa che ha pubblicato in suo libro Messaggio, non la logora semantica che rende il vecchio motto della Scuola di Sagres una sorta di luogo comune, ma l'opportunità di pensare a loro come un modo di fare, il fare la propria poesia: Imagem: Projeto "A poesia do espaço público" -F. Fernandes Entrevista

2025

The prevalence of the Internet and the proliferation of digital devices have impacted all aspects of life including the labour market and the educational system. However, not only the processes change, but the required competences are transformed as well. Therefore both students and teachers have to adapt to the respective changes. In the era of digital paradigm shift the success and effectiveness of the education effort depend on teachers' ability to meet the demands of the information-based society and being knowledgeable and capable of applying the network-based instruction methods. While previous educational theories were not suitable to describe the digital lesson or learning process, the latest trend, connectivism, integrates those features that are applicable to the current teaching and learning effort. Furthermore, it facilitates collaboration, known as interactive social activity aimed at building knowledge for the purpose of solving a given problem. While the Web 2.0 and cloud-based solutions support new options of collaboration, there are differences regarding the popularity and penetration of such devices. Our study introduces the most important and informative results of related programs promoting the activization of students, and the basic features of selected applications facilitating the realization of the three main goals of web 2.0-based systems, sharing, collaboration and the formation of on-line communities.

2025, Lecture Notes in Computer Science

When students are given agency in playing and learning from a digital learning game, how do their decisions about sequence of gameplay impact learning and enjoyment? We explored this question in the context of Decimal Point, a math learning game that teaches decimals to middle-school students. Our analysis is based on students in a high-agency condition, those who can choose the order of gameplay, as well as when to stop. By clustering student mini-game sequences by edit distance --the number of edit operations to turn one sequence into another --we found that, among students who stopped early, those who deviated more from a canonical game sequence reported higher enjoyment than those who did not. However, there were no differences in learning gains. Our results suggest that students who can self-regulate and exercise agency will enjoy the game, but the type and number of choices may also have an impact on enjoyment factors. At the same time, more investigation into the amount and means of delivering instruction to maximize learning efficiency within the game is necessary. We conclude by discussing digital learning game design lessons to create a game that more closely aligns with students' learning needs and affective states.

2025, Proceedings of the 2014 conference on Interaction design and children

Limited studies exist that explore motion-based touchless applications for children with ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder) and investigate their design issues and the benefits they can bring to this target group. The paper reports a structured set of design guidelines that distill our experience gained from empirical studies and collaborations with therapeutic centers. These heuristics informed the design of three touchless games that were evaluated in a controlled study involving medium functioning ASD children at a therapeutic center. Our findings confirm the potential of motion-based touchless applications games in technology-enhanced interventions for this target group.

2025, Annual of Sofia University St Kliment Ohridski Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics

With the fast development of computer science and technology, computer games have become one of the integral parts of modern way of living. Research studies have conveyed that educational games are motivating, engaging and provide a reliable learning context. Due to the expansion of the educational transform, game theme-based learning methodology has become one of the current research focuses. There is a need to change the traditional passive method of teaching to an active method of teaching such as game and simulation-based learning. So, we need to provide a better learning environment by increasing the student's motivation towards learning. The game theme-based instructional (GTI) modules prepare the learners to think critically, and the students can adopt new challenges of the relevant knowledge. This paper presents a novel and exciting methodology of teaching algorithms by motivating the students towards learning. We designed and developed The Ball Targeting Game consisting of two GTI modules to teach loops and choice statements. The gaming modules demonstrated in this paper were developed using Vizard, which is a virtual reality toolkit used for developing virtual worlds and immersive applications for visualization and simulation using Python as its scripting language.

2025

Improving children's writing skills is a significant concern in schools. A key problem identified is a lack of engagement and motivation with writing tasks, something which can be particularly pronounced with boys. Computer game creation has potential as an activity for improving writing skills. It can be very motivating, especially for boys, and offers an excellent opportunity for developing writing skills within a media-rich context. We argue that whilst existing game creation tools make the activity possible for school-aged children, they fall short of supporting writing skills development because the interfaces focus attention on non-literary aspects of game creation. This paper describes an approach to designing an interface which will provide targeted support for the development of writing skills through game creation. We propose design considerations drawn up through consultation with teachers, and with reference to curriculum documents and external representations literature. These guidelines will be used to inform design-based research which will take a learner-centred design approach to building the interface, allowing a number of key issues to be investigated.

2025, International Journal of Gender, Science, and Technology

Anyone interested in games, gaming and the games industry, whether in the UK or internationally, will be aware of the recent and continuing changes sweeping the market. These changes are turning last generation's market losers into clear winners, and opening new horizons for alternative development and distribution models. New demographics are turning to gaming and old ones are gaming differently and, the economic downturn aside, there is evidence of hugely shifting markets and equally shifting priorities everywhere as the casual game phenomenon spreads like wildfire across the globe.

2025

1 ABSTRACT The issue of engaging citizens in urban development and planning has experienced a significant increase in recent years. Traditional planning, control and communication approaches are reaching their limits in a more complex stakeholder landscape and an increasing desire of citizens for engagement. Novel approaches to inform and involve citizens in a playful co-creation process are necessary. Serious games and gaming are increasingly considered as the magic bullet for elevated stakeholder involvement and citizen engagement in urban planning and governance. But they are also discussed as means to instigate learning and capacity building processes and to raise awareness for urban core topics. These learning processes can unfold in different formats, such as social or game-based learning. This paper investigates, if playing the serious game prototype 'Mobility Safari' instigates social and specific learning processes and motivates players for a playful public particip...

2025

REAL CORP 2017 Proceedings/Tagungsband 12-14 September 2017 – http://www.corp.at ISBN 978-3-9504173-2-6 (CD), 978-3-9504173-3-3 (print) Editors: Manfred SCHRENK, Vasily V. POPOVICH, Peter ZEILE, Pietro ELISEI, Clemens BEYER 413 Playful Participation with Urban Complexity – Evaluation of the Co-Located Seriuos Game Mobility Safari in Vienna Katharina Gugerell, Martina Jauschneg, Mario Platzer, Martin Berger

2025

Das Thema der Partizipation in der Stadtentwicklung und -planung hat in den letzten Jahren einen deutlichen Bedeutungszuwachs erfahren. Traditionelle Planungs-, Steuerungs- und Kommunikationsansatze stosen in einer immer vielschichtiger werdenden Akteurslandschaft und dem zunehmenden Bedurfnis der Burgerinnen und Burger nach Mitbestimmung an ihre Grenzen. Um diese Barrieren zu uberwinden, wird in jungerer Zeit zunehmend mit spielerischen Ansatzen in Form von Serious Games experimentiert. Durch Serious Games sollen auf unterhaltsame Weise Information, Wissen, Handlungsmasnahmen und Initiativen vorgestellt werden. Ebenso werden stadtraumliche und planerische Fragen diskutiert, Losungen erarbeitet oder generelle Partizipationsmoglichkeiten aufgezeigt, um Akteure zur Beteiligung zu stimulieren und gegenseitig voneinander zu lernen. Dieser Artikel thematisiert, wieweit das Spiel „Mobility Safari“ Spieler und Spielerinnen spezifisches Mobilitatswissen vermittelt, wodurch das soziale Lerne...